Cross-polytope

In geometry, a cross-polytope,[1]orthoplex,[2]hyperoctahedron, or cocube is a regular, convex polytope that exists in any number of dimensions. The vertices of a cross-polytope are all the permutations of (±1, 0, 0, …, 0). The cross-polytope is the convex hull of its vertices. Its facets are simplexes of the previous dimension, while the cross-polytope's vertex figure is another cross-polytope from the previous dimension.

The n-dimensional cross-polytope can also be defined as the closed unit ball (or, according to some authors, its boundary) in the ℓ1-norm on Rn:

In 1 dimension the cross-polytope is simply the line segment [−1, +1], in 2 dimensions it is a square (or diamond) with vertices {(±1, 0), (0, ±1)}. In 3 dimensions it is an octahedron—one of the five convex regular polyhedra known as the Platonic solids. Higher-dimensional cross-polytopes are generalizations of these.

The n-dimensional cross-polytope has 2n vertices, and 2n facets (n−1 dimensional components) all of which are n−1 simplices. The vertex figures are all n − 1 cross-polytopes. The Schläfli symbol of the cross-polytope is {3,3,…,3,4}. The dihedral angle of the n-dimensional cross-polytope is

.

The number of k-dimensional components (vertices, edges, faces, …, facets) in an n-dimensional cross-polytope is given by (see binomial coefficient):

The volume of the n-dimensional cross-polytope is

There are many possible orthographic projections that can show the cross-polytopes as 2-dimensional graphs. Petrie polygon projections map the points into a regular 2n-gon or lower order regular polygons. A second projection takes the 2(n-1)-gon petrie polygon of the lower dimension, seen as a bipyramid, projected down the axis, with 2 vertices mapped into the center.

The vertices of an axis-aligned cross polytope are all at equal distance from each other in the Manhattan distance (L1 norm). Kusner's conjecture states that this set of 2d points is the largest possible equidistant set for this distance.[3]